Managing reviews

How to get more Google reviews: we tested 250 review links first

15 October 2026 · JustReview

To get more Google reviews, ask every customer the same way, at the moment they are most satisfied, with one link that opens Google’s review form directly rather than your Maps listing, and never put a reward or a “how did we do?” filter in front of it. Most of the gain comes from removing steps: a customer who has to search for your name, open the profile and hunt for the reviews tab usually gives up halfway. The link itself also deserves a check before it goes on a thousand printed cards. When we tested the stored review links of 250 businesses connected to JustReview on 15 October 2026, 20 of them (8.0%) pointed to a profile Google no longer knew, and the short versions of those links quietly dropped the customer on the Google homepage.

The rest of this post covers the three things that actually move the number: a link that works, the right moment to ask, and the places where that moment happens. Then it covers what Google does not allow, because most of the shortcuts people try are on that list.

Why every single review is worth the effort

Reviews arrive more slowly than most owners think. When we measured 532 live Google profiles for our post on review velocity, the median business collected 12.5 Google reviews in a year, roughly one a month, and went half of those months without any new review at all. At that pace, a customer who meant to write and gave up at the second tap is not a rounding error. It is a month of progress.

That is also why the advice in this post is about friction and timing rather than clever wording. You cannot make a happy customer happier with a better sentence. You can make sure the path from “sure, I will do it” to the five stars on screen takes one tap instead of five, and you can ask when the good feeling is still fresh.

Step 1: build a link that opens the review form, not your profile

Google gives every business profile one identity and then writes it down in four different ways. The Place ID looks like ChIJN1t_tDeuEmsRUsoyG83frY4 and is what developers and most review link tools use. The CID is a long decimal number that appears in older Maps links as ?cid=. The feature ID is the pair of hexadecimal numbers you can see inside a full Maps address, in the form 0x…:0x…. The g.page short code is what the “Ask for reviews” button in your Business Profile dashboard puts into the g.page/r/…/review link it hands you.

These are not four separate records. A Place ID is a small binary record, encoded in URL-safe base64, that holds the feature ID. The second half of the feature ID is the CID, and the g.page code is that same CID in a different wrapper. We confirmed this the hard way: every one of the 3,129 Place IDs stored for Google profiles connected to JustReview has the 27-character form, all 3,129 converted to a CID and a g.page code without asking Google anything, and in our live test Google’s own redirect returned exactly the CID we had computed for every one of the 226 live profiles where the redirect carried one.

The practical consequence is simple. Whichever identifier you have, you can build the link that matters, and the link that matters is the one that opens the form. Here is what each common format does, measured from Poland in a browser that was not signed in to Google:

Two details in that table are easy to miss. First, the long writereview link skips the cookie consent screen that every Maps link in our test showed to a European visitor who was not signed in, so it has one fewer screen to get through. Second, both review links send a signed-out visitor to sign in first, because only a Google account can post a review. On a phone where the customer is already signed in to Google, that step usually disappears, which is one more reason the best moment to ask is when the phone is already in their hand.

If you do not want to assemble the link by hand, our free Google review link generator finds your profile by name, builds both the long and the short version in your browser and draws a QR code for print.

What we found when we tested 250 real review links

Building a link is only half the job. The other half is knowing it still works, and Google does not make that obvious. On 15 October 2026 we took a random sample of 250 Place IDs out of the 3,064 distinct ones stored in our database and checked each against Google’s public review lookup at search.google.com/local/reviews?placeid=. For a live profile that address redirects to a Google search for the business, carrying its CID and feature ID. For a Place ID Google no longer recognises, it answers with a plain 404.

That lookup is not perfectly reliable. During one earlier pass it answered 404 twice for a profile we know is live, Google’s own office in Sydney. So every 404 in the sample was checked again, the Sydney profile was checked at the same moment as a control, and we followed the g.page short link built from the same ID as an independent second test. An ID counts as dead below only if it failed all of that.

Four of the live profiles were hotels, and for those Google sends the lookup to Google Travel instead of Search, without a CID in the address. Their short links still opened the review window of the right profile, so all 230 live IDs matched our calculation one way or the other.

How long ago did those 20 profiles disappear? We cannot see that from the outside, but our own import history gives a hint. Nineteen of the 20 dead IDs were the only Google profile on their JustReview account, and on those the newest review we had ever imported dates from July 2024 at the latest, while four never produced a review at all. Our imports also stop for accounts nobody uses any more, so this is a hint rather than proof. Still, it points to profiles that vanished months or years ago, which is about how long a printed card stays on a table. A closed business, a move to a new address or a merge into another listing are the obvious causes.

The part that should worry anyone with printed cards is how a dead link behaves. The long review link gives no sign that anything is wrong: for a Place ID that does not exist, Google responds exactly as it does for a live one, with a redirect to the sign-in page. Whatever goes wrong, it goes wrong only after the customer has already been through the sign-in screen. The short g.page link fails even more quietly, because it does not show an error at all. It lands on the Google homepage, and a customer standing at your counter will assume they did something wrong and put the phone away.

Checking your own link takes half a minute. Open https://search.google.com/local/reviews?placeid= with your Place ID added at the end, in a private browser window. If it leads to a search for your business name, the ID is alive. If Google shows a 404, build a new link from your current profile before you print anything. Google itself warns that Place IDs can change over time, so this is worth repeating once a year and every time you order a new batch of cards, stickers or receipts.

Step 2: ask at the moment the customer is happiest

Timing beats wording. When we asked 78 of our own customers for a review in the summer of 2026, every review we could tie to a request with certainty arrived within 72 hours of it, and a request added to a support reply right after the customer thanked us worked two times out of five. The full numbers are in our post on the review request email that works, but the lesson carries over to any business: ask when the customer has just told you, in words or in actions, that they are satisfied.

For most businesses that moment is easy to name. A restaurant has it when the bill arrives and the guest says it was lovely. A tradesperson has it when the job is finished and the customer walks round the new kitchen. A shop has it when the parcel arrives intact, and a clinic when the patient leaves without pain. Asking a week later, in a monthly batch, reaches the same people when the feeling has faded.

Ask once and do not chase. In our own data nobody who stayed silent past the third day wrote a review later, so a reminder on day seven mostly spends goodwill.

Step 3: put the link where that moment happens

A good link in the wrong place collects nothing. Put it where the customer already is when the moment arrives:

• A QR code on the table, at the till or on the card machine, for anywhere customers wait with a phone in hand. Print the code at least two centimetres wide and keep the white margin around it.
• At the bottom of the receipt or the packing slip, with one line saying what the code is for.
• In the text message or email that closes the job, as a plain link rather than an image, so it survives every email client.
• In your support replies, one sentence long, sent only when the customer has just thanked you.
• On the invoice or booking confirmation, for service businesses where the visit ends with paperwork.

The customer should never need to search for you. The words “review us on Google” next to a code or a link do the job. The same words next to nothing just add a chore to someone’s day.

What Google does not allow

Most shortcuts that promise more Google reviews break one of a few rules. Google removes reviews that break them and can restrict a profile that keeps doing it, so a shortcut can cost you reviews you earned honestly.

• No rewards. Discounts, free items, loyalty points and prize draws for leaving a review all count as incentivised reviews under Google’s policy, even if you do not ask for a positive one.
• No review gating. Asking customers how they feel first and sending only the happy ones to Google is selective solicitation, which Google prohibits. In the United States, the FTC’s guidance for marketers also says not to ask for reviews only from customers you expect to be positive.
• No reviews from inside. Staff, owners and family members reviewing the business is a conflict of interest, and so is writing a review on a customer’s behalf.
• No bought reviews. Packages are easy to find and cheap. What they cost later is described in our post on why buying reviews is a trap.

Asking everyone the same way, with no reward, is not only safer. It also produces a rating that looks real, with the odd three-star review among the fives, and readers trust that more than a perfect score.

Make the reviews you collect work for you

A new Google review helps the people who find you on Google. It does nothing for the visitor who is already on your website, comparing your prices and deciding whether to book, unless the reviews are shown there too. That is the last step most businesses skip after all the effort of collecting them.

JustReview pulls your Google reviews onto your own site automatically and checks for new ones every 24 hours, so nobody has to copy text by hand. You can show your Google reviews on your website as a badge, a slider or a full reviews page. The free plan covers up to 100 reviews with no credit card, and the pricing page lists what the paid plans add. If you are ready to try it, create a free account, connect the same Google profile you used for your review link, and paste one snippet into your site.